Gita 02.14 – The material is peripheral, unavoidable and ephemeral – so tolerate it

Knowledge. Thank you.

Bhagavad Gita 2.14. This is also one of the oft quoted verses from the Gita, which follows immediately after the verse on talking about our trans-body identity, so, here Krishna is saying, matra sparshas, matra sparshas, sparsha means touch or contact, matra is tan matra, the sense objects, so, matra sparshas tu kaunteya, O descendent of Arjuna, O son of Kunti, sheet ushna, sukha dukha daah, there is sheet ushna, there is heat and cold, sukha dukha, there is happiness in this sitaah, that which gives, agam apayino, such things they come and they go, anityas, therefore they are temporary, and taams, O Arjuna, these things, titikshasva, just tolerate them, Bharata, O descendent of the Bharata dynasty. So, the point which is being made over here is that, actually, O Arjuna, the bodily sensations may seem real, but they are actually temporary, and therefore, don't let the temporary distract you from the eternal, so, the previous verses said that, don't become bewildered by bodily change, but Arjuna may naturally get the question, O, but actually bodily change does cause pain, so, how can someone say that, you know, actually, just neglect the bodily change, even if I intellectually, logically, philosophically, scripturally, accept that I am not the body, still, bodily feelings do affect me, so, for example, if Bhishma and Drona are killed, they will feel pain, and I will feel pain to see them in pain, so, Krishna is telling Arjuna that taams, titikshasva, that one needs to tolerate, tolerance is a critical value for those who want to achieve something focused, which is long term, everyone in this world needs to tolerate something or the other, for the simple reason that, none of us can achieve everything that we want, we all suffer from the problem of excess, excess stimulation at the sensory level, we see that there are, the whole process of technology is often meant to increase, aggravate the sensory stimulations, so, the most good looking people with the best makeups are often shown on movies, so, the sensory impressions are aggravating, and same way we have, say, sound with Dolby effect and so many other effects, stereo effects and all those things, which are meant to make the sound more attractive, so, basically, we make the sensory stimuli more attractive, more stimulating, more agitating, and that makes all those difficult, in fact, more and more sensory stimulation is what some people consider as happiness, so, in such a situation, what can a person do? Actually, not much, a person just gets stimulated, agitated, and the more we are stimulated at the sensory level, the more we become distracted from more important things in life, a student who is too excited about a cricket match can't study, and similarly, from the first spiritualist who gets too worked up by bodily sensations, spiritualists can't actually focus on long-term spiritual things, so, tolerance means let small things pass, so that one can stay fixed on big things, so, actually, the problem is not of either small things or big things, the problem is of actually achieving the right results, achieving the right results is possible when one can neglect certain things and focus on certain things, because we cannot possibly being finite beings, cannot focus on everything that we would like to do, we can't make everything happen, and we have to choose our battles, we have to focus on certain things and neglect certain things, and all that is possible only when we recognize which are the things we are going to focus on, so, that is what Krishna is telling here, you know, so, tolerance should be seen as a tool for focus, tolerance is not a seen as a something to just be passive about, and one of the keys for tolerance is recognizing that things are temporary, temporary, they will come, they will go, now, this can be translated in multiple ways, that heat and cold and have pleasure and pain, they are all temporary and tolerate them, so, another way of understanding is that we take heat and cold as standard examples, and we take pleasure and pain as the applied examples, you know, when the heat and cold comes, we can't do much about it, we just have to accept it, it's hot, it's hot, we learn to live with it, when it's cold, it's cold, we learn to live with it, we may do something as much possible, we may use an air cooler or we may use a room heater or whatever, but beyond that, we know this is something which we can't change, so, what can't be cured has to be endured, all of us learn to accept that it's an external go on with life, so, similarly, happiness and distress, now, we know that it's external contact of the body with the external environment, external stimuli, external atmosphere that is creating sensitive heat and cold and they will come and they will go, similarly, the sensations of pleasure and pain will also come and go, there's no need to get unduly excited about them, just focus, focus, focus on the important thing and let the temporary pass, so, by remembering that we are eternal and the bodily stimuli which we experience through the senses are temporary, we can actually learn to tolerate, so, the translation of the knowledge into application, the first application Krishna uses tolerance, so, tolerate the body and in the case of Arjuna that means tolerate whatever inevitable bodily pains may come in the inevitable discharge of duty, this point of inevitable discharge of duty Krishna will talk in one of the later verses in this section, but the point is that just as the changing of the seasons is inevitable and we learn to tolerate and live with it, similarly, the discharge of duty is inevitable and in that discharge of duty inevitably some pleasure, pain will be there, so, only by tolerating that can we move forward, so, tolerate it, this is a doctor may tell, okay, this is I'm going to give, doctor may tell a child I'm going to give an injection, little pain, little bit tolerate it and as a child may wince and grumble and cry also, but an elder person will just steal oneself and take the injection, so, similarly, that is what we all need to do, tolerate and the benefit of tolerance Krishna will tell in the next verse, but in this verse, the significant point is actually there are three points, matras, vaksas, that how do we learn to tolerate by remembering that it is peripheral to our core being, that actually it is related with the body, which is related, it is related to the contact of senses in the sense of just external to our core being, it is unavoidable, so, it is peripheral, it is unavoidable and it is temporal, unavoidable means just like heat and cold are there and then, that is in the second line and then, and it is actually ephemeral, it's not going to last, so, we learn to tolerate by remembering that it's not actually happening to me, this is happening to my body and this is unavoidable and it is ephemeral, so, just let me endure it and it will pass, so, in this way, we apply the soul by learning to tolerate the body stimuli and not letting them distract us from our spiritual.